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and thereby enables them to repent and believe. If the human will concurs or co-operates with
the Holy Spirit and man actually repents and believes, God confers on man the further grace of
evangelical obedience and the grace of perseverance. Thus the work of the grace of God is
made to depend on the consent of the will of man. There is no such thing as irresistible grace.
Says Smeaton in the work already quoted: “It was held that every one could obey or resist; that
the cause of conversion was not the Holy Spirit so much as the human will concurring or co-
operating; and that this was the immediate cause of conversion.”[p. 357.] Amyraldus of the
School of Saumur did not really improve on the Arminian position by his assumption, in
connection with the general decree of God, that the sinner, while devoid of the moral ability,
yet has the natural ability to believe, an unfortunate distinction, which was also carried over
into New England by Edwards, Bellamy and Fuller. Pajon, a disciple of Amyraldus, denied the
necessity of the work of the Holy Spirit in the internal illumination of sinners, in order to their
saving conversion. The only thing which he regarded as necessary was that the understanding,
which has in itself a sufficiency of clear ideas, should be struck by the light of external
revelation. Bishop Warburton in his work on The Doctrine of Grace, or the Office and
Operations of the Holy Spirit knows of no saving grace in the accepted sense of the word, but
limits the word “grace” to the extraordinary operations of the Spirit in the apostolic age. And
Junckheim in his important work denied the supernatural character of God’s work in the
conversion of the sinner, and affirmed that the moral power of the word effected all. The
Methodist Revival in England and the Great Awakening in our own country brought with them a
restoration of the doctrine of saving grace, though in some cases tinged more or less with
Arminianism. For Schleiermacher the problem of the guilt of sin was practically non-existent,
since he denied the objective existence of guilt. And consequently he knows little or nothing of
the saving grace of God. Says Mackintosh: “This central Biblical truth (of divine mercy to
sinners) Schleiermacher for the most part passes by in silence, or mentions only in a
perfunctory fashion that shows how little he understands it.”[Types of Modern Theology, p.
96.] The doctrine of divine grace is also necessarily obscured in the theology of Albrecht Ritschl.
And it may be said to be characteristic of the whole of modern liberal theology, with its
emphasis on the goodness of man, that it has lost sight of the necessity of the saving grace of
God. The word “grace” has gradually disappeared from the written and spoken word of many
theologians, and many of the common people in our day attach no other meaning to the term
than that of gracefulness or graciousness. Even Otto calls attention to it in his work on The Idea
of the Holy that people fail to sense the deeper meaning of the word.[pp. 32 ff., 145.] The
Theology of Crisis deserves credit for stressing anew the need of divine grace, with the result
that the word is once more coming into use.
QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY:
On which elements of the ordo salutis did the emphasis fall
in the first three centuries? In how far did these centuries reveal a drift towards moralism and